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NASA releases asteroid capture mission details

The moon will be getting some company, its own pet asteroid, NASA proposes in a new budget plan. The space agency firmed up details of the asteroid-capture mission, revealed last week by Sen. Bill Nelson.

NASA has confirmed its plans to explore and bag a nearby space rock in the next decade, designating a destination for its under-development space rocket and astronaut capsule.

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WASHINGTON - The moon will be getting its own pet asteroid, NASA proposes in a new budget plan.

The space agency firmed up details of the asteroid-capture mission, revealed last week by Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., in President Obama's just-released federal budget proposal for 2014, which requests $17.7 billion for the space agency, up from the $16.6 billion that Congress eventually approved for last year's budget.

The asteroid project would send astronauts to a 500-ton nearby asteroid by 2021. They would later move the roughly 30-foot-wide space rock into orbit around the moon for later prospecting. The mission would use the space agency's now-under-development Space Launch System rocket and Orion crew capsule, modified to allow space walks by astronauts, to make the capture happen. The proposed budget next year would add $78 million to develop asteroid lassoing technology to NASA's budget.

"There will be naysayers," said NASA chief Charles Bolden at a briefing in Washington on Wednesday. He defended the proposal, tied to a call by Obama for astronauts to visit an asteroid by 2025 before moving on to Mars.

"This mission raises the bar for human exploration and discovery, helps us protect our home planet and brings us closer to a human mission to an asteroid," Bolden said.

The space agency has begun looking for smaller candidate "near-Earth" asteroids for the rendezvous and capture mission. Over the last decade, the space agency has catalogued more than 90% of the most dangerous nearby asteroids, those that are more than a half-mile wide and have orbits that bring them near Earth.

"I remain unconvinced that there is any need for humans to personally visit an asteroid. Robotic spacecraft operated by humans right here on Earth can do the job," says space policy expert Marcia Smith of SpacePolicyOnline. A space telescope that spots nearby asteroids, followed by robotic missions to sample them, makes more sense than sending astronauts, she says.

In his comments, Bolden noted that the Feb. 15 close passage of a large space rock, 2012 DA14, on the same day that a meteor hit a Russian city, galvanized public interest in asteroids. The proposed budget would spend $40 million on identifying nearby asteroids, he said.